Chapter 4 American Life in the Seventeenth Century, 1607–1692

Crude woodcuts like this one were used to identify various “brands” of tobacco--one of the first products to be sold by brand-name advertising. Then, as later, advertisers sometimes made extravagant claims for their merchandise. Early Tobacco Advertising Arents Collection/ The New York Public Library

Rice growing, imported from Africa along with African slaves to work the swampy rice fields, made South Carolina the rice basket of the British Empire. Rice Cultivation in the Colonial South The Granger Collection

Founded in 1680, Charleston grew to become the bustling seaport pictured in this drawing done in the 1730s. Charleston was by then the largest city in the mostly rural southern colonies. It flourished as a seaport for the shipment to England of slave- grown Carolina rice. Charleston, South Carolina Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

This engraving from 1830 is an example of antislavery propaganda in the pre-Civil War era. It shows hapless Africans being brought ashore in America under the whips of slave traders and, ironically, under the figurative shadow of the national Capitol. (right) Advertisements for Slave Sales in Charleston, South Carolina, Charleston had the largest slave market in the colonies. Africans Destined for Slavery Historical Society of Pennsylvania

(left) Yarrow Mamout, by Charles Willson Peale, When Peale painted this portrait, Mamout was over one hundred years old. A devout Muslim brought to Maryland as a slave, he eventually bought his freedom and settled in Georgetown. (right) The Emergence of an African-American Culture. In this scene from the mid-nineteenth century, African Americans play musical instruments of European derivation, like the fiddle, as well as instruments of African origin, like the bones and banjo--a vivid illustration of the blending of the two cultures in the crucible of the New World. Yarrow Mamout, by Charles Willson Peale, 1819 Courtesy of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia/Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection/ Colonial Williamsburg, VA

Simple by later standards, this house was home to the family of a substantial planter in the seventeenth century. It stands on land in the Virginia tidewater region first acquired by Adam Thoroughgood, who arrived in the Virginia colony as an indentured servant in By 1635, as a freeman, he had recruited 105 settlers to the colony and was rewarded, according to the practice of the headright system, with the title to some 5,250 acres along the Lynnhaven River. There his grandson erected this house in about It was continuously occupied by the Thoroughgood family for more than two centuries, until the 1920s. A Merchant-Planter’s Home and Its Dining Room Chrysler Museum of Art

These New England colonists evidently died in the prime of life. Carving likenesses on grave markers was a common way of commemorating the dead. Graveyard Art American Antiquarian Society

The New England Primer Religious instruction loomed large in early New England schools. This widely used schoolbook taught lessons of social duty and Christian faith, as well as reading and writing. The Granger Collection.

Matthew Hopkins’s Witch Finder Hopkins was a seventeenth-century English witch hunter whose techniques included watching suspects to see if diabolical creatures, in the form of common animals, fed on the alleged witch’s blood. He also urged that suspected witches be bound hand and foot and tossed in a pond. The innocent, he claimed, would sink (and often drown), while the guilty would float to the surface. His methods brought death to hundreds of women, men, and children in eastern England in the 1640s. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/ CORBIS

Note the artist’s initials, “P.P.,” on the coffin. This embroidery suggests the stoic resolve of a colonial woman, calmly depicting the inevitable progression of her own life from the cradle to the grave. Life and Death in Colonial America, by Prudence Punderson Connecticut Historical Society.